Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Meditation Buddhism Fatherhood Peace Silence Solitude Dawn Anapanasati Mindfulness of Breathing Dhammapada Buddha's Teachings Bhagavad Gita T S Eliot Four Quartets Still point of the turning world

A Meditation on Meditation (revisited)

I wanted to revisit one of my favorite pieces from this blog, A Meditation On Meditation, which explains something of what Buddhism and meditation have meant to me for the past 21 years or so... (This piece was originally published on Monday, September 6, 2010.)     It's vital, I think - especially as the father of two young children - to have some moments in the day of silence and stillness, time in which you can be totally "alone" and quiet and reflect on who fundamentally you are, and ask the question: what is this world - this extraordinary and beautiful though sometimes savage - cosmos that we live in? For me, that time is early morning, sometimes very early morning. I especially love the dawn, although often I wake to write much earlier, sometimes as early as 3am or 4am (I also mostly go to bed early and I only ever wake naturally; I would not be so happy getting up at 3am if it were forced on me by an alarm). In summer especially the dawn is a trul